Twitter is something I’m going to be using quite frequently here on DUSTYTRICE.COM. If you’ve never heard of it don’t worry. You’re not alone. It’s a relatively new social networking service that has the potential to become one of the coolest tools in your political organizing trick-bag.

So what is Twitter? It’s a social networking tool that allows people to stay connected through brief 140 character updates online or on a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone. You can use it to let someone know what you’re doing or share a link to some interesting content. The power of Twitter is that you can follow the things other people are doing and posting and they can follow you back.

And it’s FREE. As in beer.

Why do you need it? On Twitter you can post a link to a news story, comment on something you found interesting or let people know about what’s going on in your neck of the woods. Twitter is also great if you just want to follow along, seeing other people’s news, commentary and announcements as they occur. You’ll be surprised at how many like-minded and interesting people are already out there for you to follow.

How it works. Twitter is on the interwebs and you get there by going to twitter.com. Signing up is easy. All you need to do is to fill out a short form and give them your email address, which they don’t share with anyone. You can choose to keep your updates private or public. If you don’t care who reads your updates, choose public. If you want to control who can see your updates, pick private.

Twitter limits your updates to 140 characters, so when you ‘tweet’ your updates they must be kept short. This helps keep things from getting too cluttered or overwhelming. It also means that you have an option of using your mobile phone to send updates because 140 characters is the exact length of a text message. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone you’ll find that there are many great applications that you can use to post or read updates.

You will be given a twitter page that shows just your updates and let’s you see who you are following and how many people are following you back. There is also an option to see what the people you are following are saying on your ‘home’ page. You can customize your page with a wallpaper and give yourself a little icon so people can recognize you. Many twitter users have a picture of their face, but it is entirely up to you. Here is my Twitter page if you want to see what I mean.

Are there applications or clients I can use? You bet. For Blackberry you have TwitterBerry. For iPhone there are Twitteriffic, Twitterfon and Tweetie. Want something a little nicer than the webpage for your computer? Check out TweetDeck or Twhirl. Most of these applications are free.

What’s with all this @ business? What’s DM? Each user picks their username and Twitter puts an ‘@’ in front of it. For instance, my username is @dustytrice.

If you see a tweet of mine you want to respond to, you can click on the little arrow next to my post and respond or just enter my username at the beginning of your tweet. That is called an @reply. So if I write a tweet about how much I hate Tim Pawlenty, you can @reply to my tweet by saying ‘@dustytrice Pawlenty sure seems to want to be President more than he want to be Governor of MN’. Remember that everyone can see an @reply.

If you want to send me a note in private you can do that with a Direct Message or DM. DM’s are not seen publicly. There is a place on the sidebar of your Twitter page where those show up, but only you can see them. Twitter will also send you an email if someone DM’s you, which is really helpful.

What is retweeting? If someone tweets something and you want to share it with your followers you can retweet it. You’ll see a lot of messages with ‘RT’ or ‘via’ in the message indicating that someone has retweeted some information. You can just copy and paste a tweet to retweet it or there are several options if you are using a 3^rd party application. Just make sure to give credit for the original tweet by including the persons @username and saying either RT or Via somewhere in your message. You’ll see it enough that you’ll quickly get the hang of it.

How is Twitter a poltical organizing tool? You will be amazed at how much political information is flying around out on Twitter. Many campaigns, political blogs, reporters and public officials use Twitter. You can follow them to find out what they’re doing. If you have an event coming up you can let people know about it. If something newsworthy is happening you can tell people about it live.

Twitter really helps speed the flow of information between a very targeted group of people. You might get a tweet about the Sherburne County bean feed. You may tweet a link to a press release from one of your local candidates. Twitter helps you reach your desired audience easier and quicker than ever before.

How is DUSTYTRICE.COM using Twitter? I’m using Twitter to follow people from around the state who are making, breaking or reporting political news. I’m using Twitter to help spread information you need to know and interesting political stories. I’m using Twitter to report live from the events I’m covering around Minnesota. Most importantly, I’m using Twitter to interact with people who are interested in my blog and to answer questions. You can follow me here. My username is @dustytrice.

What else? Nothing else. Go sign up now. Seriously. Now.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 7:20 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.